An experiential workshop delivered online from our website to your computer
Experiential learning in an online working group

Dates 2017: TBA

What is Therapeutic Writing?

Therapeutic writing forms a personal narrative that can be revealing and inspiring, healing or cathartic. Taking time to write for and about ourselves is similar to meditating. During the writing we become deeply introspective and engage with our inner worlds. Therapeutic writing encompasses journals, unsent letters, poetry, dreams, memories of paths not taken, captured moments in time, stream of consciousness, etc. This workshop provides a space to do some personal writing and to share what you have written with other members of the same group. All the writing group members are bound by the same contract to keep professional boundaries on the written materials and to behave professionally towards each other throughout the workshop.

We hope that this workshop is a starting place. As well as writing and sharing your own writing, we also discuss how writing tasks might be used with clients and hope you will be encouraged to explore writing further and perhaps use it with clients in your therapeutic practice. Working like this online, you will find there is a level of privacy and solitude that is not available in a face to face group setting.

If you prefer, your personal narrative can remain personal to you – see below

Who is this Workshop for?

Any counsellor or psychotherapist who would like to explore how the written word might be used as a therapeutic tool with clients who work either online or face to face and who would like to experience being a member of an online learning group.

What counselling skills do I need?

During the workshop we ask you to share pieces of personal writing with other workshop members. We anticipate that the other group members treat a shared piece of wring as they would treat client information (i.e. the content is confidential). As described above, the other workshop members offer thoughts and reflections which affirm and validate the writer’s response to the task and experience. They do not offer therapeutic interventions as there is no therapeutic contract in place but they can offer reflections from their own experience that confirms/validates the writing. You may wish to share all or part of your writing or you may prefer to share the experience of writing it rather than the writing itself. What and how much you share is entirely up to you. All disclosures of personal material will remain confidential to the Workshop group.

When does it start?

The Workshop is divided into 3 two-hour sessions.

Each session will begin at 1800 hours (UK time) and end at 2000 hours on 3 consecutive Monday evenings.

How does it work?

We use creative/therapeutic writing tasks to explore the questions below and share our writing with each other.

Session 1

Who Am I?

Session 2

Who Was I?

Session 3

Who Will I Be?

By the end of the workshop you will have experienced not only how it feels to be writing about yourself in this way but also how useful writing tasks might be in your work with clients. You will also begin to assemble a toolkit of writing tasks to use with clients.

What is an online learning group?

Our groups work together online by communicating over the internet. We type our communications and send them to each other by copying and pasting them into a private chatscreen on skype. The group support, affirm and validate each other’s writing. This can sometimes provides further insights into the writer’s experience though it more often helps the writer to accept the experience more deeply inside themselves.

It is our experience that members of a group such as this often choose to stay in contact after the Workshop has finished.

If you are unfamiliar with chatrooms and would like to have an individual 10 mins. session during the week before the workshop begins, please contact Gill Jones using ther form at the foot of this page.

What equipment will I need?

All you will need is:

A computer connected to the internet which has Skype (download available free from www.skype.com).

What technology skills will I need?

It is helpful if you are a reasonably confident typist and familiar with your computer’s software for communicating (e.g. email program and a chatscreen such as Skype). You will also need to copy and paste text from a word document on to the private skype chatscreen we set up for the workshop.

During the day you will be working in two ways:

1. On your own using your computer’s word program;

2. In the Skype chatscreen with the whole workshop group.

You can complete an online application form by clicking here.
If you have any questions please contact OLT administrator, Jasmine Lamb, by clicking here.

We will be closed between the 20th December 2017 and the 4th January 2018. Email messages sent during this period are unlikely to receive a response until on or after 4th January.